This story has been updated. See below for details.
Keynote Systems, a company that measures Web site performance, created some confusion on Friday by acknowledging that it released easily misunderstood data on how Web news services fared following the death of Michael Jackson.
Keynote follows a multitude of Web sites and monitors their performance with the help of 3,000 servers in 59 countries. On Thursday, the company said the online units of major news services became nearly inaccessible for long periods of time, as people rushed online to learn about Jackson's condition.
However, site accessibility wasn't necessarily as bad as Keynote initially reported. There is no question that many media sites were under a strain starting at about 2:40 p.m. PDT, but to what extent and exactly which Web sites suffered the most is hard to determine, Keynote said.
Keynote initially said ABCNews.com was nearly impossible to log on to for nearly two hours. Dan Berkowitz, a Keynote spokesman, said Friday that in truth the site delivered pages to visitors at close to normal speed during the hour-long traffic spike following Jackson's death. A representative for Disney, which owns ABC, said the company saw "no dips in performance" as a result of the traffic glut.
"We apologize for this," Berkowitz said. "This has never happened before and it won't ever happen again."
The reason for the confusion, according to Berkowitz, had to do with the way Keynote follows the serving of ads. Apparently, some third-party ad vendors had trouble loading ads to the millions of pages being delivered. Depending on how the Web pages on news sites are constructed, this could have contributed to a slowdown, Berkowitz said.
In other cases, news stories would have loaded just fine, he said.
In Google's situation, the search engine acknowledged that some users couldn't access Google News for about 20 minutes after reports began circulating that Jackson had collapsed. It turns out Google's systems misinterpreted the traffic spike as an attack.
Update, June 29 at 11:15 a.m. PDT: Changes reflect additional information about Keynote's data collection methods.
This story was updated multiple times after it was originally published, including with a Keynote System statement that it erred in assessing the performance of ABCNews.com and other media news sites.
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(Credit: CNET News)It turns out many of the Internet's top news sites fared better at handling the glut of traffic following the death of singer Michael Jackson than previously thought.
Keynote Systems, a company that tracks site performance, said Friday that it erred in measuring performance for news sites and issued incorrect information Thursday evening.
Dan Berkowitz, Keynote's spokesman, said the most important thing was to correct the record about ABCNews.com, which he said delivered pages to visitors close to normally during the hour-long traffic spike following Jackson's death. He added that the company is still studying the causes of the error. A representative for Disney, which owns ABC, said the company saw "no dips in performance" as a result of the traffic glut.
While Keynote's assessment of site performance may have been overly bleak, many news sites were slow to deliver pages and in some cases were inaccessible at times.
When news of the iconic performer's death began trickling out, scores of people turned to the Web for information. TMZ broke the news that Jackson, 50, known for producing some of the world's best selling records, including "Thriller" and "Bad," had died Thursday afternoon, but the gossip hub cited only unnamed sources and offered few details. As other news services turned their attention to the story and as the public took to the Web to learn more about the performer's condition, some Web sites began slowing down.
Some Google users complained that the search engine's News area was inaccessible for a time.
A Google representative confirmed that "between approximately 2:40 p.m. PDT and 3:15 p.m. PDT today, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson."
CNN.com appeared to be sluggish delivering Jackson stories at times. In its defense, the news organization said that the site saw 20 million page views and a fivefold increase in traffic (from where it was prior to when news about Jackson's death began widely circulating) in one hour.
Even before Jackson's death, Thursday was a big day for news sites as word of actress Farrah Fawcett's death hit the wires in the morning and continued interest in the scandal surrounding South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.
The traffic deluge came swiftly and lasted for about a half hour, according to internal data here at CNET News, which saw twice the normal amount of hourly traffic shortly after word of Jackson's death spread. At sister site CBSNews.com, traffic numbers were five times their normal levels.
On Friday, antivirus vendor Sophos reported on a wave of spam related to Jackson's death that claims to have vital information about the news event. There are no malicious URLs in the spam, but recipients who reply to the message are then providing proof that the e-mail address is legitimate and will likely be targeted in future spam campaigns, the company said.
Corrected on June 26 at 4:07 p.m. PT: Keynote Systems, the source for Web site performance supplied CNET News with incorrect data. ABCNews.com's performance following the death of Michael Jackson was near optimal.
Michael Jackson's death sent U.S. Internet users to news sites and the traffic heated up network traffic. as evidence in these images.
(Credit: Akamai)
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